261–270 of 853 posts
---It is bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, that evolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system. Wait can people not say these things in SF? If not then what's the point of this post. If so, then wow SF, Thats messed up.
It's an analogy to "heretical" ideas from history.
Seen from abroad, SV and the US in general is becoming less appealing every day and it's not really Trump's fault.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime#Victims_in_the_Unit...
We're discussing the situation in present-day tech culture, mostly with regards to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area as compared to China.
With other westerners or with Chinese people? I think that is a crucial detail that was left out. Anyway, some people are building a future that others do not want to live in, so it is no wonder that some ideas are going to be received harshly. Nonetheless I understand that we cannot predict the future, so maybe, what people think will happen, won't. But people are fearful of a possible Pandora Box event. I personall…
imo Sam could have been almost anywhere outside of San Francisco (and Berkeley), even still within the SF Bay Area metro, and still have had the same conversation he had in Beijing. Places like SF and Alabama tend to be in the extreme left or right instead of the center. It's hard talking to or even around zealots
As someone who has lived in Alabama, I assure you that long term economic uncertainty, lack of good public education, entrenched mistrust of the government, and familial loyalty signaling do more to shape opinions than a logically sound argument and upstanding ethical principles.
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I find this sort of too-clever reflexive argument constructing impossible to take seriously. I propose a new fallacy: Argumentum ad Gödel.
I'm pretty serious with this argument, though. The entire point of the post here is that no idea is too odious to be considered unworthy of polite debate. Life extension? Sure! Gay people are evil? Sure! (For some reason, and against all evidence, we hope nobody will be convinced of that.) Eugenics is great? Sure! People of a certain race are genetically inferior and unworthy of human rights? Sure! Those who are apos…
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A competent lawyer can fix this if your NY-based employer attempts to put such language in your employment agreement. Speaking from experience several times over.
If there is no such language in your employment agreement, that is the default arrangement. I'm not going to bother having to get a lawyer to fix something that shouldn't be a problem in the first place. In California it isn't a problem. I'm firmly convinced that this fact is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is in California and not New York.
IANAL, but declining to hire a lawyer out of principle because you think that certain aspects of a given state's employment law "shouldn't be a problem in the first place" is really dumb.
One of the things often overlooked is how our (American) culture is very much driven by religion. Note that the religion is not necessarily some version of Christianity. The overwhelming religious movement rarely named could be called "progressivism". A religion, as opposed to other forms, usually has postulates you may not doubt, words you may not say, etc. That is, it constraints rational approaches in the area of…
I would add to this by positing this is not just American culture. I think all people are religious by nature, even the most rational scientist has their inexplicable religious rituals. My thought on this is that the world is simply too complicated to operate in, and everyone is looking for a system that has the answers. It is a form of compression. You don't have to handle the flow of complexity because someone else…
Science, though, does notice its own epistemic instability, so to say. It understands its limits (reproducible phenomena on which statistic methods work), and ultimately agrees that the very base of it, the hypothesis of "objective reality", is but a hypothesis, and could be wrong (e.g. we live in a simulation that can be controlled in interesting ways), and can't be proven subjectively (that is, a correctly formulated solipsism is impenetrable).
So, no, science is not tying to give all the answers. It can provide a lot of practically useful answers, though, that are also supposed not to contradict each other. That's the best we can extract from it.
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Why? Is the idea that Sam is morally corrupt too dangerous, too heretical to be voiced? Should we not debate ideas?
I find this sort of too-clever reflexive argument constructing impossible to take seriously. I propose a new fallacy: Argumentum ad Gödel.
(If you take Gödel seriously, then you can't take Gödel seriously, in which case he's correct and you must take Gödel seriously, &c.)
To have an useful discussion with someone, there needs to be an assumption of good faith on both sides - that each person will make an effort to see things from the perspective of the other, will set aside semantics and minor errors that don't matter, will directly confront key points that are brought up and will admit errors or spaces where they lack knowledge or clarity.
This assumption of good faith, in my view, has been the major casualty of modern politics and the new means of communication tech has provided to us in the last decades. It is easier than ever to surround yourself with views that match your own, to gorge on straw-men and memes and bad faith arguments that then result in pattern-matching responses when dealing with someone of opposing views.
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That said, I suspect there might be something else at play here in Sam's case. In the last decade we've seen tech grow up, and much of this has shattered the "tech is the way to a better future" idea. Google has gone from "do no evil" to the biggest marketing and personal information gathering force on the planet, with intentions that now seem ambiguous at best. Facebook has gone from a convenient way to stay in contact with people or make new connections to a machine optimized to capture human attention to such a degree that notable former Facebook folk are coming out of the woodwork to say they don't use it and forbid their kids. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated the capability to have massive impact on politics, seemingly in negative ways, and seem to avoid interest in taking responsibility for the impacts of their platforms.
All of this leads to people being less optimistic about tech and startups. Sure, Uber sounded like a great idea at the start, but now? All those people working below the API seem to be in the same spot as the taxi drivers before - making minimal money, in debt over a car instead of a medallion, etc. And above it, a valuation of billions. It feels like a resource extraction project, where the average people are squeezed for the wealth growth of investors and techies.
Capitalism has a warping effect on tech. The successful startups aren't about saving the world, or making things better - they're about making money. If that coincides with doing good for the world, great - and if it doesn't, oh well, because making things better isn't actually the name of the game. It's a feel-good thing to put SV above finance or resource extraction or energy - and less people are believing it.
China probably just hasn't gotten there yet. They're still in their tech honeymoon phase, where everything is great - easier ways to pay, communicate, etc. Given that they're used to restrictions on communication and what they're allowed to know and think, maybe they'll never leave it.
California has been ridiculous for as long as I can remember. Come to New York, we have 20 million or so people who don't give a fuck about you and what you do all day as long as you don't clog up the subway stairs. It's quite lovely.
I completely agree, but when I was walking to the train station this morning with a 25F blast of wind going straight through my coat I was actually thinking how great CA would be. :)